If I were to give the new McTerminator movie a one-word review, I think it would be… “Clumsy”. It’s like a baby dear (armed to the teeth with machine guns and grenades, of course) desperately trying to run with the big bucks and be taken seriously, but keeps tripping over itself. And every time it trips something blows up. And then, out of nowhere, Christian Bale screams. Because like everything in this movie, Bale has one note. And that note is “Yelling!”

If I were to give the movie a three-word review, I think it would be… “What the hell?” Because that was my reaction to about two-thirds of the scenes. For example, the action sequences are so clumsy that they’re nearly impossible to follow at times. I had no idea how Character X got from Point A to Point B or why Characters A, B, and C were suddenly and without explanation assumed dead. It felt like sequences that were essential to understanding what was occurring had just been cut. And I’m hard-pressed to believe they were cut for the sake of pacing, because what’s left is still paced quite awkwardly and, yeah, clumsily.

The most “what the hell” moments were reserved for the script, though. It’s bizarre how terribly expository the writing is at times, yet I was still left baffled by who these characters were supposed to be and what their thought processes were at times. Yes, we understand that John Connor is very intense and yells all the time, but how has he gotten everyone else to buy into him as a messiah? Because he has a one-minute radio program where he barks survival techniques? Because whenever he goes out to battle, he never brings anyone on his team back alive? (Seriously, he’s like the Jack Bauer of post-apocalyptic war saviors.)

Then there are all the side characters that are completely worthless. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Connor’s wife, who is pregnant and has found some really bright lipstick out in the death-drenched wastelands, but is given zero to do. Common is relegated to the token black lieutenant role, where job numero uno is… be intense! But not as intense as John Connor, because he’s the most intense everrrr!!!

Let’s see… Oh! Then there’s the “What the hell” inconsistency of physics, etc. in this movie world. We’re supposed to believe that the newest Terminator is so strong that he can twist thick titanium in knots, but can’t even knock a human out with one punch. In one scene, those motorcycle terminators you’ve seen in the trailers are dodging and sliding under rolling trucks and whatever else comes their way, completely unstoppable. Then in another scene one gets taken out by the ole “string a rope across the road” trick. Yup.

Also, did anyone else feel that the sequences with the T-600’s felt more like a zombie film than a Terminator film?

And don’t even get me started on the film’s confounding views on time travel. It’s maddening. These characters’ approach to it is plain idiotic. Granted, some of the paradoxes they have to work with are owed to the first couple of films, but I’d have to really geek out in a long discussion of time travel to explain why it worked then, but not here.

Another “what the hell” moment is the film’s title and its double appearance in the opening credits. For a long time, I had figured the title was “Terminator: Salvation“. With a colon. But it is in fact “Terminator Salvation“. Without a colon. There’s no mistaking this because we’re inexplicably presented the title TWICE in the opening credits. For some reason, that bothered me, as did the lack of colon in the official title. Is the film supposed to be about about saving the Terminators???

Lastly, have fun trying to identify all the movies McG rips off. The most inexplicable is how much he cribs from Transformers. The comparison to Michael Bay is a good place to end, though. Bay and McG have been in a well-documented internet shouting match for a while and I gotta say, Bay wins. Hands down. Because Terminator Salvation is basically a Michael Bay film that isn’t self-aware. Whereas Bay knows that his movies are to be awesome fun, but little more than that, McG believes that his explosion-fest should be taken very, very seriously. Sorry, guy, it can’t be.

This bird just flew into my window at like 80 mph. It scared the ever-living hell out of me and I spilled coffee all over my 1988 Seoul-Korea Olympic track jacket that has “Harold” stitched over the left breast.

So, when facebook turned into twitter, did it also develop a learning disability? Dyslexia or chlamydia perhaps?

I ask because I got a notification from facebook that Wilco had scheduled a conference NEAR me. Excited, I clicked to see just where they’d be playing. The Norva? The National? Were they coming back to Memorial Hall or Koka booth???

No. They will be playing the Greek Theatre at UC-Berkeley.

Crunched some numbers. That’s 2968 miles away. Or, “near”, according to facebook.